Hardware

> a1eksanderr
> Personal interests
> Fact
> Knowledge
> Technology

Just a customizable fridge that's powered by light...
RIM's new CEO on Android hardware: 'they are all the same'
To say it's been an interesting year for Research in Motion and BlackBerry would certainly be an understatement.

It was about 10 months ago that we first learned that RIM's tablet would be capable of running full-fledged Android applications, and suddenly we had to start caring about what was coming out of Waterloo. This week RIM has undergone probably its most important change since realizing SurePress wasn't a sure thing -- co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie stepped down as co-CEOs, and chief operating officer Thorsten Heins has taken their place in the head office. There have been calls for RIM to adopt Android. There have been calls fro RIM to adopt Windows Phone.
HTC Studio unveiled – tasked to help the company regain its edge. In order to combat the company’s recent financial downturn, HTC has announced a new group within the company that will report directly to CEO Peter Chou and will be tasked with developing “key products” for the company.

Dubbed “Studio,” the new team will be made up of HTC’s most talented engineers and designers in order to get HTC back in front of the competition and “regain the edge in products.” It’s unclear if HTC Studio is already operational, but this news does confirm all the recent stories we’ve reported about HTC focusing more on hero phones in 2012.

HTC will also be introducing new products that feature a variety of components sourced from multiple companies in order to give HTC as much flexibility as possible to compete.
Fujitsu Lifebook 2013.. wait.. what?
10% of South Koreans own a Samsung Galaxy S II. In case you hadn't noticed, Samsung is big.

Really big. And nowhere is that more evident than on its home turf in South Korea, where the company is a source of national pride. Not without reason, either: Samsung says that its 2011 workhorse smartphone the Galaxy S II has sold five million units in the country of 48.9 million people.

Nanotechnology

Digital infasctructure. Digital. Mechanic. Man gets smartphone dock built into prosthetic arm - Telegraph. New kind of high-temperature photonic crystal could someday power everything from smartphones to spacecraft. A microscope image of the tungsten photonic crystal structure reveals the precise uniform spacing of cavities formed in the material, which are tuned to specific wavelengths of light.

Image courtesy of Y.X. Yeng et al. A team of MIT researchers has developed a way of making a high-temperature version of a kind of materials called photonic crystals, using metals such as tungsten or tantalum. The new materials — which can operate at temperatures up to 1200 degrees Celsius — could find a wide variety of applications powering portable electronic devices, spacecraft to probe deep space, and new infrared light emitters that could be used as chemical detectors and sensors. Compared to earlier attempts to make high-temperature photonic crystals, the new approach is “higher performance, simpler, robust and amenable to inexpensive large-scale production,” says Ivan Celanovic ScD ’06, senior author of a paper describing the work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

MWC 2011: What to expect from HTC. Robotics. Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots. Big Shiny Robot - Fox Moving Forward on ‘Daredevil’ Movie. According to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, 20th Century Fox has tapped a fellow named David Slade to bring a new Daredevil film to life.

Word has it that it will be a continuation of Ben Affleck's not perfect but certainly under-appreciated Daredevil film as opposed to a reboot. Which is good news since the last thing we need is a rehash of his origin story. Slade has at least one other movie in production between now and Daredevil. He's no stranger to comics adaptations or genre pictures, he directed the adaptation of 30 Days of Night and Twilight: Eclipse. He's a music video director, so Daredevil might at least look cool. There's no word about Affleck's involvement, but I thought he was a great Daredevil and I would love to see him take another crack at ol' Hornhead. And if Jerk-Bot's sources are correct, this film needs to be in production by next year for Fox to retain the rights, so expect it to happen. Hey BSR readers! Previous Post: STAR WARS: Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. One Per Cent: Japan sends robots into Fukushima nuclear plant. David Hambling, contributor Hostile environment.

Smoke rises from reactor buildings in this satellite image of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant taken on 17 March (Image: DigitalGlobe) The team working to contain the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant now includes a robot. The machine, known as Monirobo ("Monitoring Robot"), was on the scene today, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun (in Japanese). Monirobo is designed to operate at radiation levels too high for humans.

Monirobo weighs some 600 kilos and is limited to a speed of 2.4 kilometres per hour. The robot was developed by Japan's Nuclear Safety Technology Centre in association with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry after the Tokaimura nuclear accident in 1999 in which two workers died. The machine now in use is Red Monirobo; a Yellow Monirobo, which has tools for collecting dust samples and sensors for flammable gas, is expected to be deployed within the next day or so.